There have been a handful of studies on kindergarteners’ motivational beliefs about writing, yet measuring these beliefs in young children continues to pose a set of challenges. The purpose of this ...exploratory, mixed-methods study was to examine how kindergarteners understand and respond to different assessment formats designed to capture their motivational beliefs about writing. Across two studies, we administered four assessment formats — a 4-point Likert-type scale survey, a binary choice survey, a challenge preference task, and a semi-structured interview — to a sample of 114 kindergarteners engaged in a larger writing intervention study. Our overall goals were to examine the benefits and challenges of using these assessment formats to capture kindergarteners’ motivational beliefs and to gain insight on future directions for studying these beliefs in this young age group. Many participants had a difficult time responding to the 4-point Likert-type scale survey, due to challenges with the response format and the way the items were worded. However, more simplified assessment formats, including the binary choice survey and challenge preference task, may not have fully captured the nuances and complexities of participants’ motivational beliefs. The semi-structured interview leveraged participants’ voices and highlighted details that were overlooked in the other assessment formats. Participants’ interview responses were deeply intertwined with their local, everyday experiences and pushed back on common assumptions of what constitutes negatively oriented motivational beliefs about writing. Overall, our results suggest that kindergarteners’ motivational beliefs appear to be multifaceted, contextually grounded, and hard to quantify. Additional research is needed to further understand how motivational beliefs are shaped during kindergarten. We argue that motivational beliefs must be studied in context rather than in a vacuum, in order to work toward a fair and meaningful understanding of motivational beliefs about writing that can be applied to school settings.
•An RCT family-based intervention increased adult-child conversational turns.•Across all participants, turn-taking changes (TTC) predicted neurocognitive changes.•TTC predicted verbal, nonverbal, and ...executive functioning improvements.•TTC predicted cortical thickening in left inferior frontal and supramarginal regions.•Neuroplasticity mediated relationships between TTC and language development.
Children’s early language environments are associated with linguistic, cognitive, and academic development, as well as concurrent brain structure and function. This study investigated neurodevelopmental mechanisms linking language input to development by measuring neuroplasticity associated with an intervention designed to enhance language environments of families primarily from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Families of 52 4-to-6 year-old children were randomly assigned to a 9-week, interactive, family-based intervention or no-contact control group. Children completed pre- and post-assessments of verbal and nonverbal cognition (n = 52), structural magnetic resonance imaging (n = 45), and home auditory recordings of language exposure (n = 39). Families who completed the intervention exhibited greater increases in adult-child conversational turns, and changes in turn-taking mediated intervention effects on language and executive functioning measures. Collapsing across groups, turn-taking changes were also positively correlated with cortical thickening in left inferior frontal and supramarginal gyri, the latter of which mediated relationships between changes in turn-taking and children’s language development. This is the first study of longitudinal neuroplasticity in response to changes in children’s language environments, and findings suggest that conversational turns support language development through cortical growth in language and social processing regions. This has implications for early interventions to enhance children’s language environments to support neurocognitive development.
Education sculpts specialized neural circuits for skills like reading that are critical to success in modern society but were not anticipated by the selective pressures of evolution. Does the ...emergence of brain regions that selectively process novel visual stimuli like words occur at the expense of cortical representations of other stimuli like faces and objects? “Neuronal Recycling” predicts that learning to read should enhance the response to words in ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOTC) and decrease the response to other visual categories such as faces and objects. To test this hypothesis, and more broadly to understand the changes that are induced by the early stages of literacy instruction, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with pre-school children (five years of age). Children were randomly assigned to intervention programs focused on either reading skills or oral language skills and magnetoencephalography (MEG) data collected before and after the intervention was used to measure visual responses to images of text, faces, and objects. We found that being taught reading versus oral language skills induced different patterns of change in category-selective regions of visual cortex, but that there was not a clear tradeoff between the response to words versus other categories. Within a predefined region of VOTC corresponding to the visual word form area (VWFA) we found that the relative amplitude of responses to text, faces, and objects changed, but increases in the response to words were not linked to decreases in the response to faces or objects. How these changes play out over a longer timescale is still unknown but, based on these data, we can surmise that high-level visual cortex undergoes rapid changes as children enter school and begin establishing new skills like literacy.
•First randomized controlled trial testing the causal impact of reading instruction on visual cortex in pre-school.•Two-weeks of learning causes changes in the visual response to words, faces and objects.•No evidence for competition between categories of visual stimuli for cortical territory.•The visual undergoes rapid changes as children enter school and learn new skills like literacy.
Rapid online assessment of reading ability Yeatman, Jason D; Tang, Kenny An; Donnelly, Patrick M ...
Scientific reports,
03/2021, Letnik:
11, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
An accurate model of the factors that contribute to individual differences in reading ability depends on data collection in large, diverse and representative samples of research participants. ...However, that is rarely feasible due to the constraints imposed by standardized measures of reading ability which require test administration by trained clinicians or researchers. Here we explore whether a simple, two-alternative forced choice, time limited lexical decision task (LDT), self-delivered through the web-browser, can serve as an accurate and reliable measure of reading ability. We found that performance on the LDT is highly correlated with scores on standardized measures of reading ability such as the Woodcock-Johnson Letter Word Identification test (r = 0.91, disattenuated r = 0.94). Importantly, the LDT reading ability measure is highly reliable (r = 0.97). After optimizing the list of words and pseudowords based on item response theory, we found that a short experiment with 76 trials (2-3 min) provides a reliable (r = 0.95) measure of reading ability. Thus, the self-administered, Rapid Online Assessment of Reading ability (ROAR) developed here overcomes the constraints of resource-intensive, in-person reading assessment, and provides an efficient and automated tool for effective online research into the mechanisms of reading (dis)ability.
Tumor suppressors with extracellular function are likely to have advantages as targets for cancer therapy, but few are known. Here, we focused on angiopoietin-like 4 (ANGPTL4), which is a secreted ...glycoprotein involved in lipoprotein metabolism and angiogenesis, is methylation-silenced in human cancers, but has unclear roles in cancer development and progression. We found a deletion mutation in its coiled-coil domain at its N-terminal in human gastric cancers, in addition to hypermethylation of the ANGPTL4 promoter CpG islands. Forced expression of wild-type ANGPTL4, but not ANGPTL4 with the deletion, at physiological levels markedly suppressed in vivo tumorigenicity and tumor angiogenesis, indicating that the latter caused the former. Tumor-derived ANGPTL4 suppressed in vitro vascular tube formation and proliferation of human umbilical vascular endothelial cells, partly due to suppression of ERK signaling. These showed that ANGPTL4 is a genetically and epigenetically inactivated secreted tumor suppressor that inhibits tumor angiogenesis.
Summary
Macrophages/monocytes and the proinflammatory mediators, such as tumour necrosis factor (TNF)‐α, prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), macrophage inflammatory protein (MIP)‐1α and MIP‐1α, play a critical ...role in the progression of immunological disorders including rheumatoid arthritis, Behçet’s disease and Crohn’s disease. In addition, the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor‐α7 (α7nAChR) subunit is an essential regulator of inflammation. In this study, we evaluated the expression of the α7nAChR subunit on human peripheral monocytes and the effect of nicotine on the production of these proinflammatory mediators by activated monocytes. Fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC)‐labelled α‐bungarotoxin demonstrated the cell surface expression of the α7nAchR subunit. Pretreatment with low‐dose nicotine caused inhibition of TNF‐α, PGE2, MIP‐1α and MIP‐1α production, and mRNA expression of TNF‐α, MIP‐1α and MIP‐1α and COX‐2 in lipopolysaccharide (LPS)‐activated monocytes. These suppressive effects of nicotine were caused at the transcriptional level and were mediated through α7nAChR. Nicotine suppressed the phosphorylation of I‐κB, and then inhibited the transcriptional activity of nuclear factor‐κB. These immunosuppressive effects of nicotine may contribute to the regulation of some immune diseases.
PDF
